Once again the double standard is blatant. Critics of Islam are treated as bigots. A heroine like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who faced death threats for criticizing Islam won't be getting an award, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein will. Ali is denounced as a bigot, booted off campuses and smeared in the press. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein receives the uncritical acclaim reserved for those who promote the unthinking prejudices of the left. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about Islam, which may not be criticized. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes about Orthodox Judaism, which like the more religious forms of Christianity, is an optimal target. Obviously...

One, and only one, candidate, Barack Obama, caught the X-factor and improbably got himself nominated and elected, and re-elected, president. Another improbable candidate could catch it again.What is that X-factor? How does it upend things?Peace and personal security continued to flourish in 2014 and are likely to continue into 2015 and beyond. This is important news. It also is news the news media can ill afford to report. But voters sense it.Two of our greatest public intellectuals, Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack, provide a defining Â“state of the worldÂ” summation in Slate.com inThe World Is Not Falling Apart. The evidence...

Neuroscientist Steven Pinker on the triumph of peace and prosperity over death and destruction You are less likely to die a violent death today than at any other time in human history. In fact, violence has been declining for centuries. That is the arresting claim made by Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking). The title, taken from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, refers to the way in which the modern world encourages people to suppress their inner demons and let their better angels fly. Just...

For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost. –Stephen Jay Gould [Y]ou’ve heard me complain about scientific organizations that sell evolution by insisting that it’s perfectly consistent with religion. Evolution, they say, threatens many peoples’ religious views — not just the literalism of Genesis, but also the morality that supposedly emanates from scripture. Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences — the most elite organization of American...

A Darwinist Religious Experience Described April 11, 2009 — As millions of Jews just completed Passover, and as millions of Christians gather to celebrate Easter, a Darwinist reporter was experiencing “existential vertigo” – a sweeping sense of dizziness as her imagination zoomed in and out of the implications of her faith. It may be the closest thing that a secular materialist can call a religious experience. And religious experience is an accurate description: it was the outworking of an all-encompassing world view, with ultimate causes, ultimate destinies, moral imperatives, and heavy doses of faith. Amanda Gefter (see her previous attack...

Moral conservatives were shocked to read a thinly veiled defense of infanticide in the New York Times a few years ago by MIT [now of Harvard] professor Steven Pinker. But they would be even more disturbed if they saw Pinker’s justification for his views in a book that appeared about the same time. In How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that the fundamental premise of ethics has been disproved by science. “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”...